Good times outweigh challenges of past year

With the new year upon us, I’m looking forward to all the new adventures we will find in 2019.

Seeing each new day as an opportunity for adventure is a philosophy we had to adopt to retain our sanity when many of our adventures seemed to be lessons of when bad things happen to good people. Until we learned to ride the waves of our lives with humor, humility and gratitude, many of our mundane adventures could be summed up in the lyrics of the old song from “Hee Haw;” “Gloom, despair and agony on me.” Now, when one of us is struggling to find the humor of a situation, the other needs only to hum the tune of that silly song to get the other to smile.

The good outweighed the challenges in 2018. We hummed our song to each other in January when the radiator in our Jeep blew a few days into our Florida trip. We realized quickly that as inconvenient and expensive as it was, we were under a palm tree and sunny skies while we waited for a rental car to be delivered to us. It was repaired in a day’s time and we drove to the beach with the top off and the salt air blowing.

We had missed the cold and snow of February in Ohio but still found ourselves complaining about the cold and snowy March when we returned. Teaching our little grandson to make snowballs and snow angels was an occasion for joy. We were glad not to have missed that.

In June, we went on a plane to Savannah and drove to St. Simon’s Island to be with chosen family and shoot their family photos on the beach and marshes there. Splashing in the Atlantic and counting the new freckles cropping up across the nose of healthy at last, sweet Darby was one of those moments that I’ll always be grateful to have had. Moments like those don’t necessarily cancel out the challenging moments, but remembering them help you smile through hard times.

A new medication for MS gave me perpetual nausea and made my hair fall out but I kept picturing us laughing in the sun and surf and rode it out. Later, the 60 pound weight loss made it so that I finally cleaned out my closet. I donated or gave away most of the clothes I had procrastinated about for too many years. The joy I find in its order and simplicity now has helped balance the challenges of this very necessary treatment.

I don’t know what the challenges will be in 2019. I’m sure there will be many. I’m sure there will be “gloom, despair and agony on me” times. But I’m every bit as sure that there will be laughter, moments in the sun, and I can already see us splashing with our grandson in the Gulf of Mexico this February.

May the good outweigh the challenges for you, dear readers in this New Year and here’s to smiling through all your adventures.